It's November. You're getting your holiday shopping in order and decorating your home. You're busy—really busy. And now it's time to find photos. You search your computer for that lovely shot of the family gathered around the Thanksgiving table from last year to send to your mom. You swipe through pages and pages of images on your phone looking for that picture of you and your honey to have framed as a gift. You hunt all over Facebook for that amazing picture of your dog in a Santa hat. You're sure you shared it there at some point. But you can't find any of them! You curse yourself for not organizing your holiday photos last year.

Don't make the same mistake this year. Follow these very small steps to organize the new holiday photos you take this year and avoid dealing with a disorganized mess when you want to find and share those precious memories.

In With the New, Forget About the Old
This story isn't about organizing old photos. Save that task for a rainy day. Instead, focus for now on keeping up with new photos you take this holiday season.

Delete the Worst Photos Immediately
The sooner you delete bad photos, the more time you'll save down the road, and the more efficient your photo organizing will be. Delete photos that are out of focus, badly composed, or just plain ugly while they're still on your camera or smartphone. Sometimes you want to keep duplicates until you can see them on your computer screen in greater detail to save only the very best one. When you do import your photos, delete any additional images that don't meet your standards. Don't keep garbage!

Consolidate Your Photos
As soon as possible after taking photos (within a week, ideally), get them off your camera and smartphone, and move them to a safe place. Pick one place where you will keep all your photos. Don't worry about where your backlog of thousands of photos is stored. Just think about where you will do it now and going forward.

You might use an online storage service, Apple Photos, Flickr, a dedicated folder on your computer, or even an external hard drive.

Flickr comes with two big benefits: 1) You get 1TB of space for free and 2) it automatically sorts your photos chronologically, so you can look for images based on the month and year you took them. I find the process of using Flickr to be a little clunky and slow, especially when adding tags and descriptions.

Feeling indecisive? Try Box.com. You get 10GB of space for free, which isn't nearly as much as Flickr offers, but Box gives you the ability to can easily invite other people to upload their photos to the same folder where you've put yours, all while letting you keep your images private. I'm not saying it's the best service ever, but you get a lot of space and it takes very little time to set up.

If you're super extra mega disorganized, the easiest way to upload and organize photos from your iPhone is to use a cloud-based file-syncing program that has an auto-upload or camera upload feature for mobile phones.

Name Your Albums or Folders
As you consolidate your images, create a few folders or albums for sorting purposes. It's usually best to name them according to the event or occasion, but you'll also want to include the year. Use the year as the first part of the name, for example, "2015 Thanksgiving," but not "Thanksgiving 2015." Why? When you sort your folders by name, they will automatically appear in chronological order if the year comes first. Smart, right?

Do you need separate folders for similar occasions, like "2015 Christmas" and "2015 Christmas Eve?" Probably not. A year from now, will you be able to remember what happened on Dec. 24 versus Dec. 25? Probably not. So keep it simple and just use major events.

Name Your Images
Name your image files. It really makes them easier to find later. For files stored on my computer, I use a year-month-date system, so that a photo taken on December 20, 2015 will have 151220 at the start of the file name. Again, when sorted by name, these files will fall into chronological order.

If six-digit codes seem like overkill, just use the year at the start of your file names. It will still help you find photos quickly later.

If you're saving images to Flickr, give every photo a clear and descriptive name. Don't try to be clever. Make the name match the search terms you might use in a year to look for the photo.

Add Stars to Favorites
Another way to make life easier for yourself later is to add stars to your favorite photos. Most photo-hosting and file-hosting services give you some way of flagging your favorite pictures. When it comes time to share them or browse through them yourself, you'll be able to skip to all the winning images.

Tag Your Photos, If You Have Time
How will you search for photos five years from now? If you've put six-digit date codes into the file names or used keywords to name your pictures, that should be enough to help you find what you want. If you take a lot of photos, though, tags might be a good idea, too.

Think broadly, not narrowly, when choosing tags. Facial-recognition tags help tremendously as well. Add them early in your photo organizing process, while the details are still fresh in your mind. Of course, if you're short on time, skip tagging. It's not the most-important part of organizing your photos.

Back Up! Back up your photos. (Well, back up your most-important data, all of it.) There are numerous online backup services that keep an extra copy of your files safe for you without asking you to do much at all. You can also back up to an old computer, an external hard drive, and for photos, even SD cards will do.

Tips for Taking Your Best Holiday Photos
Next week in this column I'll share tips from photography experts for how you can shoot the best holiday photos you've ever taken.